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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Happy Halloween!

Happy spookyday everybody!

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. Shame I live in the middle of nowhere and can't do anything today and I'm not in much of a state to go out anyway, but hey. Such is life.

A friend recently told me I'm going to die alone. I stated that was ridiculous. Absolutely absurd. All my best friends are ghosts. They'll totally be with me.

And the best part? I've got a skeleton friend on the inside. He know's what's up.

The answer? Ghost birds. Lots and lots of ghost birds. And they all hate you. Don't look up.

I'm going to tell a true story to you all right now. This story didn't take place on Halloween and wasn't nearly so scary as most campfire tales. It's also not the type of story I tell to people for reasons that will become obvious soon.

When I was a teenager I lived in a house with four other guys. It was a convenient roomate situation. The house was nice, conspicuously cheap, and other than weird cold drafts, totally comfy. That is precisely the setup for a ghost story. Which is exactly what this is.

In between drinking crates of soda, playing D&D and doing what nerds in their teens and early twenties do, we loved to play with neat little technological toys. One of those was the black light. That was when we discovered some rather conspicuous stains that we could only barely see without it.

A very large round stain in the middle of the living room, followed by drag marks into a bedroom (not mine) into a closet, where there was another very large stain. A closet that was always cold. Which, let me tell you, is quite convenient in the middle of the desert. If I'd had that room, I'd have hung out in it all the time, but I digress.

Having discovered the stains, we got the bright idea to check some newspapers. And sure enough, we were living in an actual honest-to-goodness murder house. And worse, the landlords were too cheap to change out the carpet. They hadn't even done that good of a job of cleaning it. It's kind of gross.

The story, it turns out, was not some mysterious tale of intrigue. It was almost disappointing. Some teens had had a party there, and two boys had gotten into a fight. Over what, we never found out; the article never said. They'd been drinking, and one of them pulled a knife out. A girl jumped in between them to try and stop them from fighting just as he swung the knife. Between the newspaper and the stains, we puzzled out what happened.

After they'd stabbed her she stayed bleeding on the carpet while the two boys panicked. The police showed up, and they dragged her into the closet in an attempt to hide her, where she bled to death. The police were not fooled.

This is the point where I should point out that although I was nerdy, I WAS a teenager, and I was actually not bad looking since I worked out. I was probably the only one in the house that could be said of. I also noticed a lot more of the mysterious cold breezes than anyone else - both before and after we found out about the murder. Particularly when I was alone, or getting ready for bed.

Well I thought nothing much of it. I've always been neutral on the existence of ghosts. Still am. Maybe they exist; maybe they don't. But this experience has led me to believe that maybe they do. And then I blush, and realize it's a bit ludicrous to use THIS as an example.

I was alone in the house. There was absolutely no one else there. Everyone else had already gone to work, and I was hot and groggy, since I'd just woken up. Once again, this was in the desert. So I figured I'd take a shower. I felt a lot of strange cool breezes, but thought nothing of them by this point. It was comforting in the heat. If the ghost wanted to fan me, I was fine with that. So I get undressed, I hop in the shower, and I feel kind of strange for some reason. Not uneasy or bad, just strange.

Then I hop out of the shower, and before I can grab a towel, I hear something.

I've been all over the world; seen a lot, done a lot, but I've never heard anything like this sound before or since. It was the sound of a girl orgasming in a rather unique way.

I can't really describe the way it sounded, save that it sounded very much like a girl very loudly cumming her brains out, weirdly echoey and distant like it was coming from the other end of a vent with a fan in the middle while still in the same room. At the same time it didn't exactly sound like that. It's really hard to describe. "Weird trippy girl voice loudly cumming her brains out" is the best I can do.

Well, I put on my WTF face, searched the house, and found that no one had accidentally left a porn vid playing or anything. The place was quiet. Nothing in there could make a noise like that.

So I put the dots together. Only teenage male in a house where a teenage girl died. A lot more strange cool breezes than the others. And now, a girl's voice orgasming as I stepped out of the shower, totally nude. A voyeuristic ghost girl was schlicking it to me.

This idea did not freak me out. It made me feel extremely embarrassed since I also felt proud of it, which is incredibly silly. I don't know if the girl was cute before she died since the newspaper didn't give a picture or even a name, but I'd like to think so.

Well, real or just a trick of the imagination, I now have a distinct love of ghost girl porn. I moved out of that house not long after that because the building got demolished to make some sort of bigger luxury house, but I was a bit more... exhibitionist after that experience. No more echoey girls cumming, but there were still lots of breezes.

I still don't know if it was all imagination, but either way, I got to live out a real life ghost story! The kind that doesn't end with calling for an old priest and a young priest or an excess of unnecessary tape recorders and a fresh corpse or anything. When I was there, I never once felt that I was threatened. I felt good there. To this day, I'm not the least bit frightened of ghosts.

But if anything, I took this away from it. There could be a cute ghost girl behind you, schlicking it to you watching porn, right now. Turn around and give her a smile.




Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Developing an H-Game: Getting started.

I love games. I love H-Games as well. I enjoy seeing people happily produce new things. There's a strong financial incentive that let's people do this in Japan if they're good enough at it, but in the rest of the world, this isn't really the case. It's almost exclusively the domain of hobbyists, and you'll see most games halfway finished, then abandoned by the wayside.

I'm also a hobbyist. So take my advice keeping that in perspective. I won't tell you how to make a game on the level of a professional studio. I will, however, help you get a start as a hobbyist. Overwhored was started because I love these games and don't see enough of them. I wanted to inspire other people to create their own games, and to an extent I've been successful. I can point to at least one project inspired by Overwhored that's out there now. That makes me happy. Overwhored is far from finished, but I intend to continue working on it, and as I do, I hope others come to make their own games in turn.

I want to continue that process here and now.

If you're thinking of making an H-Game, that's great. But you need to consider why you're doing it. You probably won't get a lot of IRL credit for it (more likely you'll get the opposite), and you probably won't make money off of it either.

My inspiration is simply that I love RPG's, I love H-games, and I love making things. When I get the chance I simply enjoy tinkering with the system to make new stuff, try new things, and enjoy making something. Even if no one else would ever see it, I'd probably keep making it. Most of the stuff I've made in my life is like that. Much of the adult content I've made in my life, be it stories, games, and so on, have simply been deleted when I finished them, and I was content knowing they were made. Other people getting to see my stuff is a strange idea I've only recently come to be comfortable with.

Other people use other things. A supportive spouse who helps you out, making something with friends, and so on. Whatever it is, you need to find something of your own; something that drives you to make your game.


It's important for this reason:

You have to be capable, ultimately, of starting and finishing a project yourself. If no one else supports you, if you never make money off of it, you still have to be willing and capable to push through and finish it. If you start as a team, you need to be ready to finish the project when your partner wigs out.

That means you have to know what you, personally, are capable of. Do you write? Do you draw? Do you program? What is your specialty? Knowing that is half the difficulty.

You'll want to select an approach that utilizes your own talents as best you can. Renpy is good if you can draw and write. RPG Maker is good if you can understand a bit of basic programming logic and write. Making your own system is good if you can program.

Still, there's a bit of a problem before you begin working with your system. Before we start a story, we'll build up a perfect vision of a fairy tale castle of a game. It'll be perfect! It'll have flashing lights, and animated cutscenes, and the best art! It'll have the best story ever, and if you just give me the money I'll hire a team to make it and no I don't have experience, why do you ask? Wait, why won't you give me money?

Remember; in the end, it has to be something YOU are capable of beginning and finishing yourself. I hired artists for Overwhored, but I paid for every single picture out of my own pocket until Overwhored gained enough popularity that people donated. If people didn't donate, I'd still be paying out of my own pocket. It'd take much longer, but I'd damn well do it. The game would be progressing no matter what. I did my darndest to learn how to draw, so I could one day do some art for my own work. And I started with placeholder pictures. You have to be willing to take responsibility for your own project and show people what YOU can do. Once you've done that, THAT is when people are willing to help.

I didn't start with Overwhored, though. When I began, I knew how to write, and nothing else. I didn't know how to use RPG Maker, I didn't know how to draw more than a stick figure.

More than likely, you'll start off in a similar situation. So what should you do?



GETTING STARTED WITH YOUR SYSTEM

 First step, select your system. I selected RPG Maker, so I'm going to use that as my guide. Much of this advice is going to help you get started in any system, though.

I like RPG Maker, but it has flaws. I have a friend who swear by older versions of flash. I know some people who love Renpy, or one of the many other game making systems out there. Once again, this depends on your own talents. My friend that prefers flash is an amazing artist; his work is great because of his amazing quality art. I'm pretty much entirely a writer. I'd love to make a visual novel, but at the time my art was stick-figure tier. Plus, I'd played around a bit with RPG Maker on the playstation back in ye olden days, hindered primarily by the fact that I had no keyboard for the Playstation and text had to be painstakingly pecked out bit by bit. In the end, I decided I'd go with RPG Maker VX.

At this point I did not start on Overwhored. There is a very important lesson you should learn right away. You should NOT make your fist project your big dream project. As we play games we love we build up a dream of the game we'd like to make. We imagine big, perfect stories that have a huge backstory and elaborate setup. I could have started right away on such a project.

Instead I made about 20+ games designed around one thing: Learning the system. That's precisely what you should do.

These games were not complete; they were never intended to be. The stories were often very simple and cliched. Recruit a party, rescue the princess, kill the evil boss. But they fulfilled a very important function.

When you imagine your perfect story, you do so lacking something very, very critical. Knowledge of your system. You imagine cutscenes you have no idea how to make, you imagine stories with backstory you don't have the capability to show or make relevant to the main plot. You imagine elaborate magic systems you can't implement.

If you go in trying to make your dream project before you know the system, you will rip out your own heart and stomp on it. That is when most people give up. They start with a big story idea, a perfect dream of a game. Then they realize it's a lot of hard work to make one, their story is hard to tell in the system, and much of the cool stuff they imagined is impossible to pull off with the tools and skills they have. Disillusioned, they give up.

That is why you do the many, cliche little game projects. It's hard enough to learn the basics of a system; if you also burden yourself with the stress of trying to reach an impossible ideal it will crush you. If the story is cliche, you know it by heart, which means you don't have to think much about it. If it's something you're not attached to, you'll have no problem abandoning it once you realized you screwed up with something basic. Your first few games with ANY system are going to suck. Period. That's true of everyone, and it'll certainly be true of you. Making very simple games where you're not attached to the story is important. This is not your dream project. This is not your perfect vision of a game. This is you messing around and learning what you're doing. You don't have to feel bad when you mess up on a test project.

I made a recreation of my house, with a short game where I fought off zombies invading. I made a typical 'rescue the princess' story more than once. I played with minigames, events, and so on.

And so I came to learn just how the system worked. I was able to adjust my writing style to the system, and I knew what I could and couldn't do.

This is precisely what you should do no matter what your system is. Learn how to do it first, mess around with stuff that's inconsequential and you feel no attachment to. Keep it simple, keep it direct and linear and cliche. There'll be plenty of time for great stuff later. But you can't make good games without having the proper foundation. There's an extra bonus to this, of course. You have an excuse to play a ludicrous amount of games like the one you're trying to make so you can try out stuff in them and see if you can make them in your own system. It's often difficult, but very satisfying to realize you can pull off some stuff you've seen in one of your favorite games.

One of the first things I did was work with this RPG Maker VX Tutorial file.

http://www.4shared.com/office/9nuSqPnj/beginners_guide_to_rpg_maker_v.htm

I did every step in it several times. I did it exactly according to the guide the first time through. Later I changed the course of events, changed the items, changed the actors and played around with every aspect I could. But I still gladly held to the format. It's an excellent document if you want to start with RPG Maker VX.

I looked at websites for tutorials, I played around with every aspect of the system I could think of to try and learn more.

And I still sucked.

But the important thing was this: I knew how it worked now. I was ready for a big project.



HYPNO MASTER:

Hypno Master was a short, fairly crappy game about a fellow that runs around and mind controls girls. It's extremely simple, very basic and pretty short. But it's something I'm very proud of for all that it sucks, for one reason.

It's a completed project.

That's vital. Before you tackle a big game, make at least one complete, short game. Even after learning the system, you'll be surprised just how tough it is to make even a very short game.

Before you start a project like this, you'll need to make a very clear outline, with a defined beginning and end to the game. You don't need pages of backstory or volumes of character references here. There's precisely one purpose to a project like this: Getting a finished game out. An entire, self-sufficient game. You won't believe how much that will boost your confidence. More importantly, it'll help you learn just what you need to actually do to create a finished story. When you want to make something bigger, it'll tell you just what you need to do to make it happen. It puts everything into perspective.

After you've learned the system, this is your goal. A finished project with a defined beginning and end. It doesn't matter if it's short or crappy. You want it done. That's the most important thing. Prove to yourself you can finish a project in this system. Learn precisely what it takes to actually do that.

I didn't even consider starting Overwhored until after I was done with Hypno Master. Overwhored was not my dream project; it was something I wrote up AFTER I made that game. I have no dream project. If you make it this far, feel free to pull the writing you did for your old project out and look at it. You'll understand why you'll never make it by now. But that's alright. You'll make something better.

Be proud of that.

If you want to play hypno master, feel free to click on the link to the Copper Edition below. The Copper Edition has no lolicon content; the regular game did. I'm not interested in distributing the version with loli content at this time, but on the plus side the Copper edition is funnier. Also: Check the forest for an extra bonus.

http://www.4shared.com/rar/DWkVApj6/Hypno_Master_Copper_Edition_-_.html


Next time I'll talk a bit about story writing and structure, as well as game resources. Hope this helps you get started!


Monday, October 28, 2013

Quick Update

Not much for me to report right now. Just got back from a hospital visit. Have a few more later this week. Once this post is done I'm going to bed.

Not much done last week due to stuff like the above. Tomorrow I'm going to write a post to help people considering making their own H-RPG, or just RPG in general, or just game in general. I'm not feeling up to it at the moment though.

I'll help anyone who wants to make a game with advice. I won't make your game for you, but I'll definitely help point people in the direction of resources and show you how to outline a story and set up a game. Come back tomorrow, I'll go over that then.

One other thing: I'm going to be looking into methods of promotion for the game soon. I'll want to ramp it up right before I release the next chapter (though that's a ways away) I don't have an advertising budget, so if you have suggestions, I'd like to hear 'em.

See you tomorrow.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Updates and Considerations

Hi again, everyone!

I've been doing a bit of work on the game lately. The boat scene is done, the quest to get to the boat is done, and dungeons generally take a lot less time than complex cutscenes. The boat scene involved a ship-to-ship battle, so it took a bit of time.

I'm probably going to be in and out of the hospital this week and over the next few weeks - nothing serious, hopefully, but between that and work I don't know how much free time I'll have, since the hospital is an hour away. (I would suggest not having any sort of medical emergency where I live.)

This brings up a simple consideration. I hate taking so long to release a new version of the game.

This version needs several more things to be complete, some of which have complex cutscenes and such.

What I'm considering is adding several sex scenes for existing characters, doing the island dungeon, and then making the 'main continent' where you capture the dwarven heroine a separate release. Though all the maps have been redesigned, this will be a pretty short release if I do that. I'm going to put a poll at the end of this so you can decide whether you want to wait, or you want to get the release ASAP.

If you want to wait, I can't say how long it'd take. If you want it fast, I should be able to finish up the island dungeon and run through the game to fix some things related to the all new maps by the 4th of next month (depending on the outcome of hospital visits).

To clarify, here's what still needs to be done (Not counting the island dungeon):


1: Make the ruined village
2: Make the dwarven village
3: Make the hidden monstergirl village
4: Make the volcano dungeon
5: Finish up the tunnels dungeon

I may cut the ruined village and place a small camp there instead, and I miiiight push the hidden monstergirl village to the release after. The Bilbao chapter (Basque Lamaak heroine) will be a lot shorter than this one.

I've already done a bit of work on the above.

Now for some art previews! I honestly don't recall if I've shown some of these before. The next version WILL include the option to impregnate the three initial slaves, as well as a redrawn threeway bj scene.

This is important: When the next release comes out, I will include ALL sketches, small and large versions of images currently in the game with the beta release download for donators only. Those of you donating have been very kind, and I want to give something back. It's about time I did this.

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On the my art front: I still suck at shading, but recently got a new color palette and my lineart is looking a lot better. I'm starting to think I might be able to draw a scene or two for the game, but the main issue remains shading. My attempts at blended shading still look terrible and I still have no natural sense of how shading works.

Here's where I am right now, my latest pic. I used a photo for reference with it. With references, I seem to do alright. Without everything I do looks atrocious. This took me a few hours, spaced out over time.


If nothing else, I may be able to make some temporary art until it can be replaced with art done by a real artist on the team. It'd make me feel less like I'm wasting my time when I'm drawing instead of working on Overwhored, anyway. Right now I feel like I don't spend nearly enough time on anything I'm doing.

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Miscellaneous:

I'm going to plug two games now. Been meaning to for a while.

The first is called Harem Collector. You play as a guy out to enslave over a hundred women with the aid of magical mind controlling slave collars.

The game is made by a fellow that goes by NoMoshing and his wife, Nekochan. They're both excellent people. He started as a fan of Overwhored, decided to make his own game and ended up making a great one. It's far from complete but he updates regularly and his content is good. He's contributed to Overwhored by helping with some of the more complex events, and the cast has a cameo in his game; I'm planning to return the favor when I can get a chance.

If you enjoy Overwhored and want to make your own game, I will help you. With resources and advice, anyway. Harem Collector is a great game and I would love to see a thriving community emerge. I have a resource page up here for just this reason.

You can find his game and download it here:
http://nomoshingsgames.blogspot.ca/

I basically consider this a 'sister' game to Overwhored. Give these kind people some love. They do great work.

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The Second game is called Ashford Academy.

Ashford Academy continues in the tradition of the Hentai Highschool games. You're the principal of a highschool which starts out prudish, and your goal is to make it preposterously perverse during your stay. You can be good or evil and corrupt various teachers and students along the way. It works in a VN style, but plays out more like the classic HHS games than an actual VN.

Now this does come with a disclaimer: This sort of game DOES use ripped images from various established games. It isn't done for profit, however, and I'm quite sure no one intends disrespect for the games the images are taken from.

This was exactly the sort of game that got me started on making games myself. I'm a bit obsessed about not having copyrighted material in my current work so no one can ever take it down, but make no mistake - games like this are where I got my start.

 I made a few events for this to show my support; actually. I did them hurredly, didn't actually program them (someone else did that for me) and didn't proofread them. I couldn't justify taking away more than an evening from Overwhored.

They are in the latest version, however. A version which came out today; the one year anniversary of the game's creation.

If you have an evening free, you should play it!

You can get the latest download (Which came out today!) here:
https://www.henthighschool.com/ashford-academy/public-demo-ashford-academy/msg9769/#msg9769

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Now for the polls:



Quick Release or Full Chapter?
  
pollcode.com free polls 



Should Cypress_z do some art for the game?
  
pollcode.com free polls 

Have a good week, everybody!